Die Don't You is a limited edition giclée printed on Minuet Cotton Rag Paper, finished with Gold Foil.
This work explores mortality through the visual language of the Mexican sugar skull, tattoo iconography, religious imagery, and folk symbolism. The skull, gilded in gold leaf, is transformed from a traditional memento mori into an object of reverence. Historically associated with the divine and eternal, gold becomes a surface upon which the traces of a human life are recorded.
Across the skull are symbols of love, faith, beauty, transformation, loyalty, and endurance. Roses sit beside anatomical hearts, while swallows, serpents, fish, eyes, and devotional imagery intertwine with traditional tattoo motifs. Together, they reflect humanity’s attempts to understand, celebrate, resist, or transcend mortality.
At the centre sits the phrase DIE. DON’T. YOU. Deliberately fragmented, the words can be read in multiple ways as a command, denial, challenge, warning, question, or statement. The viewer is invited to complete the sentence, becoming an active participant in its meaning. This ambiguity mirrors the uncertainty of death itself: universal yet unknowable.
Drawing on the tradition of the memento mori while rejecting its solemnity, the work presents death as colourful, adorned, and inseparable from life. Rather than asking us to fear death, it asks whether we are truly alive before it arrives.